Texas Student Admits She Lied About Being Followed by Anti-Muslim Gunman
Last Wednesday, the day after three Muslim college students were killed in Chapel Hill, N.C, a student at the University of Texas-Arlington told police a man followed her to campus in his truck and pointed a gun at her before driving away. On Facebook, she worried he may have singled her out because she's Muslim.
But on Friday, after the university and two local police departments had begun investigating the threat, the student confessed the incident never happened, the Dallas Morning News reported. A university spokesperson said it had come out in followup interviews with the student—whose name has not officially been released—that she hadn't been on campus that morning.
Her initial description of the suspect, who allegedly followed her for six miles, was extremely specific: He was "a white man in his mid-30s wearing a camouflage baseball cap, a short-sleeve blue shirt and bluejeans. He also wore a black bracelet and a wooden bead bracelet on one wrist," and his white Ford pickup had a Texas flag on the antenna.
It wasn't clear as of Friday night why the student fabricated the story or whether she would be charged with filing a false report.
Conservative news sites and wackadoodle "anti-Jihadists" are all over this one, using the made-up report to dismiss actual hate crimes against Muslims, which, of course, never happen. (And by "never happen," I mean, "skyrocketed right after 9/11, and haven't significantly declined since 2002.")
